Well-known internet comic "Penny Arcade" has just posted a new comic in relation to WoW. This comic is in regards to certain posts over at Blizzard's forums about GM abuse.

Not being able to word it as well as the people at Penny-Arcade, I will post the message Tycho placed to go with the comic.

There was some sort of roiling tempest on the WoW boards, something about GM abuse, or maybe a gamemaster was just a member of a guild when he was off work, or maybe it wasn't a gamemaster at all but just a Blizzard employee, or some other scenario completely inextricable from the noise all forums generate. I could not reconstruct the trajectory of the complaint, though it has been suggested that a person did something bad, which (obviously!) I'm opposed to.

In any case, real gamemaster abuse looks like this. If you are cowering and afraid, prostrate and shoeless on the cobblestones in Stormwind, some kind of abuse has occurred. That is how you will know.

Those Goddamn forums are an unceasing wall of useless jungle sounds. While we're on the topic.

Fuck only knows what's going on in there. Every class specific board has its own cadre of misunderstood prophets, leading their /signatories to a statistically equitable promised land. Each profession crawls toward a unique doom which only they can perceive! That is why it is critical that their grim revelations be bumped at fifteen minute intervals, lest their potent visions lose rank to fresher jeremiads.

Perhaps it is true that outside my awareness, mathematical proofs of my deficiencies throb wetly. It would not surprise me. My official proclamation is as follows: they are allowed to fix each profession's debilitating and potentially imaginary bugaboos after they get their server downtime and performance under control. I've never played a game where the servers were more stable when it was a beta, but eventually the novelty of that fact ceases being delightful. Whimsy recedes and the amount on the monthly bill seems to rise off the paper like braille, growing in stature.

I'm satisfied that we made a good pick for Game of 2004. But there is a reason Blizzard has the reputation they do, and it's because they're supposed to be better than this.